Keith Douglas hard to find poetry

Keith Douglas (1920 - 1944) was an English poet and soldier. He was killed in action during the Normandy invasion in World War Two. There is readily available criticism of Douglas online but not so much poetry. 

His splendid poem The Marvel below is referenced only in quotes so I have added it here. Its direct language and observation is counterpointed by Douglas' metaphysical, intelligent and slyly humorous reading of the scene.

The marvel

A baron of the sea, the great tropic
swordfish, spreadeagled on the thirsty deck
where sailors killed him, in the bright Pacific

yielded to the sharp enquiring blade
the eye which guided him and found his prey
in the dim place where he was lord.

Which is an instrument forged in semi-darkness;
yet taken from the corpse of this strong traveller
becomes a powerful enlarging glass

reflecting the unusual sun's heat.
With it a sailor writes on the hot wood
the name of the harlot in his last port.

For it is one most curious device
of many, kept by the interesting waves
for I suppose the querulous soft voice

of mariners who rotted into ghosts
digested by the gluttonous tides
could recount many. Let them be your hosts

and take you where their forgotten ships lie
with fishes going over tall masts -
all this emerges from the burning eye.

And to engrave that word the sun goes through
with the power of the sea
writing her name and a marvel too.


More on Keith Douglas can be found here http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Keith_Douglas and four of his poems appear in Ted Hughes and Seamus Heaney's well-known 1982 anthology The Rattle Bag.

Poetry International London, England 17th - 21st July 2014

A feast of poetry on the south bank: this festival was founded by English poet Ted Hughes. It aims to unsettle and inspire.

Poets include Sujata Bhatt, Ana Blandiana, Carolyn Forché, Durs Grünbein, Robert Hass,  Kutti Revathi, Nikola Madzirov, Mohamed El Deeb, Patrick McGuinness and Don Paterson. Plus many others in readings, workshops, innovative spoken-word performances, free events, poetry films, exhibitions and new commissions and translations.

You can find the full details here http://www.southbankcentre.co.uk/whatson/festivals-series/poetry-international and the programme here http://issuu.com/southbank_centre/docs/89288_poetry_international_lr_pdf_p.

Cramped space and poetry

Ted Hughes said he did his best writing while working  in a kind of cupboard rigged up as an office. He had left the desk looking out of the window for his wife Sylvia Plath to write at. They were still getting on at this time.

Sometimes poems can come in the most unusual circumstances.

Some research has been done on workstations and whether sitting at a a desk at all is helpful to doing work. One tip is to only go to your computer when you have something to do on it. Just staring at the blank screen (like a blank piece of paper) doesn't help anyone get creative.

So here is an odd idea for a Sunday...go and fix up some thinking room in a place you never go in your home, garden or anywhere really.

I was orienteering yesterday and ended up on my back pinioned between the twisting branches of a fallen tree I had just fallen over engulfed by deep bracken. I was competing but lay there a little while thinking how good the sky looked. And that I never see it that way normally.

Thanks to Kenraiz for the use of this photo. 

Ted Hughes reads Pike live

...A pond I fished, fifty yards across, 
Whose lilies and muscular tench 
Had outlasted every visible stone 
Of the monastery that planted them- 

Stilled legendary depth: 
It was as deep as England. 

lines from Pike by Ted Hughes

A poem of suggestion and history - the predator we fear hunted by the predator we are.

Listen at the Poetry Archive here http://www.poetryarchive.org/poetryarchive/singlePoem.do;jsessionid=8466765E5C73210549AEB5A01E47C291?poemId=7079. Poem starts about 1m 20s.

Acknowledgements to the Pike Pool for the image.

Machine poets: the movement of big things

Man and machine, a combination that has existed in poetry since classical times; early English examples include John Donne's The Compass

If they be two, they are two so
As stiff twin compasses are two;
Thy soul, the fix'd foot, makes no show
To move, but doth, if the' other do.

and Spenser's dissertation in the Faerie Queene on the uses of wood

    The Eugh obedient to the benders will,

    The Birch for shaftes, the Sallow for the mill,

But at the moment I am interested when machines stand for a certain kind of grit and honesty; less renaissance man who has an interest in science and more alpha male who "likes the movement of big things".

W.H.Auden's factories stand for social truth, Work has been stopped on the powerhouse; the wind whistles under/The half-built culverts while The square munition works out on the old allotments/Needs stricter watching (The Orators 1931); a society of which he is an observer and excluded (Stop all the clocks). But what often appeals to me is the more fifties brand of machine poet. Ted Hughes' Tractor is a badge of manhood endowed with all the pain of a rite of passage:

The tractor stands frozen - and agony

to think of...[]

It defies flesh and won't start

hands are like wounds already

Inside armour gloves...

In the end its superhuman power is mastered and it starts like a Blakean engine or mill. Simon Armitage's poem Very simply topping up the brake fluid (Yes, love, that's why the warning light comes on...) takes the process one step further. The chance of failure that in Hughes's poem is contained within the poet himself is split into a male expert and subservient female persona, the love in question. But Armitage's poem is a cry against the feminisation all men feel when they get out of their depth with machines; it is perhaps a logical step to men (and women) bathing in pies to assert themselves (The practical way to heaven) in Armitage's latest collection Seeing stars (something not so far away from D.H. Lawrence's nudity and wrestling).

This has to end for the moment in a call for machine poems and poets; the series is to be continued...